Snow felt herself nodding off again, and struggled to stay awake. She had to stay conscious long enough to finish her essay; it was due tomorrow, and she'd already sat through Master Karlyle's lectures on deadlines several times--and had no desire to repeat the experience once more. Blinking at the tattered piece of parchment, she tried to remember where she had been when she'd started to fall asleep this time.
Thank goodness; she was nearly at the bottom. An essay on all the current royal families tended to take quite a long time to complete; there were at least twenty small princedoms in Torlemont alone, with ten or so more in Mossenden, and that wasn't even mentioning the families that ruled the entire countries. And, of course, Master Karlyle had insisted that she write at least one paragraph about each and every member of each and every royal family member, including herself.
She was at the bottom now, though, with the current royal family of Mossenden. Sighing, she dipped the quill in the inkwell and applied it to the parchment to write the final paragraph.
Prince Rayden of Mossenden, she wrote. He was the King's heir, but mysteriously disappeared on his way home after a trip to the royal castle of Torlemont. No one knows what happened to him, but he is currently assumed dead, although it is only a year since his disappearance and quite possible that he is alive somewhere.
The disappearance of Prince Rayden had, in the past year, become one of her pet unsolved mysteries. She'd always had quite a penchant for any mystery that had remained unsolved; she'd never actually found the solutions to any, but she'd worry over them and try to solve them anyway. Prince Rayden's disappearance was more frustrating than most; perhaps it had something to do with the fact that she'd actually met the man. True, she'd only spoken to him once or twice the entire time he'd been in Torlemont, but that didn't matter; she'd still met him, and her curiosity demanded to know what had happened to him.
She'd tried asking her sister once; after all, she had stated innocently, since Rosa had known him so very well, perhaps she would have some idea what might have caused him to disappear so suddenly. Rosa had stomped up to her room without ever giving her a straight answer--not that she really thought her sister knew anything about it. More likely, she'd just been angry at the reference to her little affair with the Prince.
And she thinks it's some sort of big secret, she thought scornfully, as if everyone in the castle didn't know the two of them were sleeping together. Everyone also knows she had her heart set on being his wife, and was pretty ticked off when he left without saying a word about it. But of course, she thinks all that is some sort of big secret.
In a way, it was; after all, nobody ever talked about it in public--and yet everyone knew about it. It was what she had once heard her father refer to as a "gigantic secret scandal," which hadn't made much sense to her at the time.
It made sense now, now that she'd experienced it firsthand. Everyone knew about it, and everyone knew that everyone else knew about it, but nobody talked about it, and nobody ever let on that they knew, even though everyone knew that they knew.
On second thought, maybe it didn't make sense now. It was just too confusing.
Shaking her head, she rolled up the parchment into a neat little tube and secured it with a piece of twine, then closed her inkwell and placed it and the quill into their safe compartments inside her desk. She was walking towards the door when she tripped over the leg of her desk and went sprawling to the floor. It wouldn't have been that much of a catastrophe, but the parchment caught on something as she fell and ripped straight in half, neat as you please.
Snow generally didn't approve of profanity, but at the moment she was mentally cycling through every curse word she knew. Why had the gods cursed her with such bad luck? She'd never met anyone who was as much of a klutz as she was. Her luck had been just fine before she hit puberty, too; but after that, she'd become the worst klutz in all Torlemont.
Her bad luck rubbed off, too. Anyone she'd ever been on her way to becoming friends with had immediately become every bit as much of a klutz as she was, with accidents plaguing them everywhere they went. From the instant they stopped being friends with her, their bad luck ceased.
Her bad luck (and the fact that it was contagious) was well known. Hence, she had absolutely no friends.
Taking in a deep breath, she tried not to think too hard about how much work had gone into the ruined essay, and got to her feet. The torn parchment she threw in the nearby wastebasket; crossing the room to her desk, she pulled out another sheet, along with her inkwell and quill.
She'd just have to work on it the rest of the day, that was all. She wouldn't get anything else done, and Miss Jorlian would fuss at her for not completing the math problems she'd been given, but what else could she do? She really didn't have much of a choice.
But before she started, she really needed to have a snack. Technically, she wasn't supposed to be eating anything before dinner; but right now, she was starving, and knew she could sneak something out from the kitchen.
Opening the door, she turned and headed down the stairs, taking the steps one at a time and very carefully. She'd learned a long time ago that stairs were one of her worst enemies; she'd broken her leg in three places once, by taking a nasty fall downstairs. Hence, she was as careful as she could be anytime she was anywhere near a set of stairs--but that didn't always stop her bad luck from kicking in.
Apparently, it wasn't enough to stop it today. She stumbled over her own two feet, then tripped on empty air, and went tumbling headfirst down the staircase. She heard something snap and her right wrist started throbbing, and then her head collided with the banister and stars swam in front of her eyes.
Rosa was standing at the foot of the stairs, looking surprised. "Snow! Are you all right?" she exclaimed, bending over.
"You're all fuzzy around the edges," she told her sister confidentially, then grinned. "You look awfully funny."
Rosa ran to get a healer, and Snow spent the rest of the day in the infirmary with a broken wrist and a concussion. She'd spent so much time there that she knew half of the healers quite well by now, and they knew her. She'd laughingly said once that they should know her; fixing her when she broke was one of their hobbies.
Maybe her luck wasn't being all bad today. After all, with a broken right wrist, at least she had an excuse for missing the deadline on her essay.
She was up and out of bed the next day, but tripped over a table and sprained her ankle within half a candlemark of leaving the infirmary. The healers bound it up, gave her a pair of crutches, and told her to be more careful in the future. She promised she would, and hobbled out with the aid of the crutches. The whole conversation had become routine.
She was excused from lessons until her ankle fully healed, but when her father and sister and most of the rest of the castle left to go on a hunt--a hunt that she was excluded from, supposedly because of her injuries but really because hunts, as everything else, were a complete disaster when she was present--she grew bored and read the day's lessons in her school books anyway. She even read the lesson in geography, normally her least favorite subject. After another half a candlemark of sitting around in her room trying to think of something to do, she gave up in disgust and went for a walk around the castle.
She didn't dare go downstairs, of course; with the crutches occasionally hindering her balance and almost no one else in the castle, she didn't even want to think of the mess she was capable of getting into. She walked all the way around the upper floor three times, then decided to explore some of the rooms besides her own. Torlemont castle was huge; she'd been living in it for seventeen years, and she still hadn't seen all of it. She doubted she ever would; she didn't think anyone in the castle knew every nook and cranny of it, although she could be wrong.
The first three doors she tried were locked, but the fourth--the door to Rosa's room--opened the instant she pushed it on. Curious, she hobbled inside and looked around.
If she'd been expecting to find out some sort of dark secret about her sister, she was disappointed. The room looked perfectly normal. Bare of Rosa's belongings, it would have looked a lot like her own, with the mere exception that this room's decor was entirely in different shades of red, whereas Snow's was in shades of blue. The mahogany bed with the velvet curtains and silk sheets was exactly the same, as was the chest of drawers and the large walk-in oak wardrobe. With Rosa's things in it, it looked entirely different; Snow's room was so organized it looked almost bare, whereas Rosa's possessions were strewn all over the place in piles.
Shaking her head, she continued inside and started to look around, not really sure what she was looking for. The contents of the wardrobe were exactly what she would have expected; all three drawers in the nightstand were locked, with no sign of a key anywhere. Several jars of face paint were strewn atop the chest, with a large mirror on top of it all, as though it had been casually discarded on the nearest surface.
She'd seen the mirror many times; Rosa packed it with her everywhere she went, even on the shortest of trips. It was actually a very beautiful object; silver steel with engraved roses around the border, and a large opal embedded in the handle. She'd never seen it up close before; curious, she picked it up and gazed at her reflection.
Green eyes stared back at her, set in a face tanned bronze by the sun. She blew a strand of black hair out of her face irritably; it was almost down to her shoulders again. She'd have to get it cut soon. People had told her that it might be quite pretty if she let it grow out; she'd tried it once or twice, and had hacked it all off in annoyance within a week. It was getting in her way constantly anytime she let it grow further than the tips of her shoulder blades.
She dropped the mirror in shock when a face appeared inside it that wasn't her own.
She stood there for a moment, heart hammering in her chest, before she made herself pick it back up. Hand trembling, she turned it around and gazed into the glass.
Her own face stared back at her, emerald eyes wide.
She stared at it for a long time, waiting for the face to come back. She knew she'd seen it; she knew it! She'd only gotten a glimpse, but it was enough to have a vague impression; brown hair, green eyes like hers, but a man's face, and entirely different from her own. It couldn't have been her imagination. It couldn't have been.
If it was, she was going crazy. She knew she'd seen a face.
She waited for what seemed like several candlemarks, but nothing happened. At last she glared at her reflection in disgust and carefully put the mirror back where she'd gotten it, then picked up her clutches and hobbled back out. Her curiosity had completely disappeared after she'd seen (or imagined, or whatever) the face in the mirror. Carefully closing the door behind her, she hobbled into her room and lay back down on the bed, closing her eyes.
Imagining faces in a mirror that weren't hers. What was wrong with her?